The usual Hollywood pitch goes something like “It’s ‘Die Hard’ — in an amusement park!” Or “It’s ‘Speed’ — on a subway!” Or “It’s that Asian horror film everyone loved at Toronto — but without Asians!”

So if Guy Maddin had to convince Hollywood studios to invest in “Keyhole,” he’d have probably described it as “It’s Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ — meets ‘Spooks Gone Wild’! Done as a film noir!”

Luckily for both of them, Maddin and Hollywood rarely come into close contact.

The Canadian filmmaker tends to work further out on the fringes, making movies that sometimes look like art installations. (“Keyhole,” for example, was actually a commission from Ohio State University.)

Yet they’re also suffused with an almost obsessive love of old cinema — from the constructivist epics of the early Soviet Union to the B-movie gangsters that collide and collapse here.

Maddin’s movies have always run the gamut from invented autobiography to a ballet of “Dracula”; to say that “Keyhole” is one of his more narrative-driven films is not saying much.

It has something to do with a ’30s criminal on the run, holing up with his gang inside a dilapidated haunted house. Except the house is the criminal’s own; the ghosts, the members of his own family — who may be truly dead, or might be merely haunting him.

Beyond that, there’s not too much direct connection to a conventional crime thriller, or even Homer (although our main character is named Ulysses and his chief objective is to return to his long-suffering wife).

What there’s plenty of, though, are the sort of dreamlike images and effects that Maddin is so skilled at — gauzy double exposures, sudden solitary explosions of color, stark contrasts that turn human faces into leering, grease-painted monsters.

Although the film was shot digitally — a first for the director — it has the same homemade, handmade look as his “Brand Upon the Brain!” or “The Saddest Music in the World,” movies that wildly melded art-school irony to old-school technique.

It has, too, the usual Maddin loyalists, including Isabella Rossellini as Hyacinth, the neglected wife. A good, darkly intense Jason Patric is Ulysses, Udo Kier is a mob doctor and aging Kid-in-the-Hall Kevin McDonald is an ill-fated hood.

Maddin’s movies aren’t for every viewer, and I expect “Keyhole” is for even fewer. Darker and more tightly twisted than his recent films, it’s full of edgy images — a kinky amputee, a naked (and obese) old man, and a good deal of full-frontal nudity and sexual activity.

In fact there are more images than ideas here, and even for fans, the film can be tough going. Yes, sometimes the whole thing comes together like a poem or an early surrealist experiment. But too often, it just seems like a jumble of fantasies and daydreams.

Yet it always — always — feels like a Guy Maddin film, a straight bracing shot of outsider art and insider fandom. And that’s still something to be savored.
Ratings note: The film contains violence, graphic nudity and sexual situations.

'Keyhole'

(R) Monterey (94 min.)

Directed by Guy Maddin. With Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini. Now playing in New York.